Financial advisers have a central role to play when it comes to sustainable investing but they are not the sole bearers of the responsibility to create change, delegates at the UKSif good money week conference have said.
James Corah, head of sustainability at CCLA, said advisers sat at the coalface of information but there was only so much they could effectively do.
He said: "It's very easy to point at a different part of the chain and say it's your responsibility.
"And in many ways advisers sit in this interface between clients and asset managers, which means that they do have an ability to be a conduit of information up and down the chain but they're only one part of the chain.
"So to allow them to do that asset managers have to get better at listening to the advisers about what their clients want and then acting upon it and then communicating back down again.
"So I genuinely don't think we can pick upon one part of the chain and say they are more responsible than others, what we got to do is to try and get everyone together to think it through and that's a piece of work we're trying to do at the moment."
Tony Burdon, CEO of Make My Money Matter, said: "Don't pin it on the financial advisers, they're part of the system."
He said there was a bigger issue of understanding your money, which starts with financial education in schools.
To make communicating sustainable investing easier, asset managers should be clear about what theory of change they are exercising, said Corah.
It needs "very clear articulation of what we're trying to do in that portfolio and the work beyond the portfolio", he said. "Then you have to start proving it."
Different markets lend themselves to different theories of change, what matters is that it's clearly communicated and the results are highlighted, he said.
"It's a communications challenge. We work in an industry that obfuscates, we need to make simple. And we need to tell people why their money is having an impact."
Burdon said there was a lot of activity taking place as companies, and pension funds, try to transition.
"There's a job to do on [stewardship]. But those serious pension schemes are trying to report on that and show that they are aligning and there's a competitive market and the ones that want more custom want to show that kind of leadership."
Corah said the industry needed to work out how it can make people trust it and be proud of what it does again.
"For me this isn't a conversation just about how we tell stories, it's a conversation about how we make people find their money interesting, how we make people connect with it, how we make people understand ... how their money can be through shareholder votes, through shareholder resolutions, through engagement, through conversations with unions, can lead to [a] company moving forward a little bit.
"If we can start telling stories of how engagement is bringing portfolios to life, and how that is having a little bit of an impact, we can begin to chip away at this perception that our industry always does the wrong thing, get people excited about their money and begin to rebuild the position where actually we are admired for the work that we do."
carmen.reichman@ft.com
